WHAT IS HINDUISM?
‘non-duality’ – not as a more spiritual type of relation but
as relation per se. They accord with Buber’s understanding
that the ‘spirit’ itself is no ‘thing’ but is our relation with a
divine Other or ‘Thou’ – with ‘God’. The principle of
Advaitic philosophy is that we can come to experience this
divine Other as a divine Self or ‘I’ within us, and within all
beings – in every ‘Thou’. The seeming dualities of ‘I and
Thou’ or ‘Self and Other’ dissolve as soon as we recognise
that both the divine Self or ‘I’ and its divine Other or Thou
are but dual poles of a singular, non-dual relation. Buber
distinguishes ‘spirit’ – which he understood as an inner
relation to a Divine Other or Thou – from ‘soul’, which he
saw as an inner relation to the world and other human
beings. The ‘self’ that is ordinarily constituted by our
everyday social relations is most often the ordinary
‘worldly’ or ‘social’ self consisting of what Jung called ‘ego’
and ‘persona’. Yet what if our relation to the world and
other people came itself to be centred in another self – that
Self constituted by a spiritual relation to the Divine? In this
way the duality of ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, of the human being’s
inner relation to the Divine on the one hand, and to the
world of individual human beings on the other, would
dissolve. The two relations would themselves be
experienced as dual aspects of a singular relation – that
relation whereby the divine itself manifests as every ‘thing’
and ‘being’ in this world. This singular relation between
God and World is one that can come to be experienced in